May 30, 2022 / Unchained Daily / Laura Shin

Daily Bits✍️✍️✍️

Elon Musk announced SpaceX will accept Dogecoin.
One River spot bitcoin ETF rejected by the SEC.
FTX CEO Bankman-Fried said the company is ready to spend billions on acquisitions.

Today in Crypto Adoption…

Binance was registered in Italy as a legal entity.
Russia is considering allowing digital currencies to be used for international transactions.
India’s central bank reported its approach for a CBDC.
Paraguay introduced a new bill to regulate virtual assets’ commercial activities.

The $$$ Corner…

Huobi Global acquired Bitex, a crypto exchange in Latin America.

What Do You Meme?

What’s Poppin’?

LUNA Takes a Rollercoaster Ride After the Launch of New Terra

Do Kwon’s plan of reviving the Terra blockchain after the UST fiasco is now officially in motion, as Terra 2.0 was launched on Saturday at 6 am UTC. The launch of the network came along with the airdrop of LUNA, the native token of the new chain.

Even though the chain’s launch was successful, the LUNA token price suffered a lot of volatility over the first hours, as it hit a maximum of almost $20 and a low of $3.63. As of press time, it is trading at approximately $5. At the moment LUNA has a market cap of more than $1 billion, making it a top 50 cryptocurrency, according to CoinMarketCap.

In addition, there are several centralized exchanges that have already listed the new LUNA token on their platforms. Kucoin, which was one of them, reported that it was the second most traded token of the day, with $140 million in trading volume.

There was a lot of speculation around the token price, and many called it a pump and dump scheme. Moreover, there is concern that the price might continue to fall after Binance unlocks the LUNA airdrop on Tuesday morning. Binance’s address has more than 15 million LUNA to distribute among its users, according to crypto user Terra Watcher. “Binance unlock on Tuesday will move the market,” they said.

The launch came after several days of debate and the passing of an on-chain governance proposal made by Do Kwon, which was supported both by Terraform Labs and Terra Builders Alliance. The proposal consists of forking Terra into a new chain without UST, the algo stablecoin that caused the collapse of the first blockchain.

The old chain was renamed “Terra Classic” and its native token is now called Luna Classic (LUNC). As for the new chain, it is called just Terra (even though many are saying Terra 2).

Without UST, the new Terra is just another alternative layer 1, competing with projects like Solana, Avalanche and others. Orbital Command, a validator of the blockchain, pointed out the advantages of Terra 2 over the other layer 1s, highlighting Terra’s decentralization.

There are several DeFi applications that have confirmed they are going to continue their projects on the new chain. Some of them are Nebula, Sigma, Prism, Astroport, Phoenix, Nexus, Spectrum, Anchor, One Planet, Random Earth, and Coinhall.

On a related note, the blockchain analytics company Nansen published a report in which they analyzed what happened with the UST collapse looking at on-chain data. “We refute the narrative that one hostile party led the responsibility for destabilizing UST,” they concluded.

On The Pod…

Hester Peirce’s Former Counsel on Terra 2.0, XRP and a Bitcoin Spot ETF

Coy Garrison, former counsel to SEC Commissioner Hester Pierce and partner at Steptoe & Johnson, discusses the role of regulation in the crypto industry and what the SEC could be doing to make crypto a better space. Show notes:

how Coy started working with crypto
why Coy decided to leave the SEC
why recent comments by SEC chair Gary Gensler made him hopeful in how the SEC approaches crypto
how the crypto industry has grown and evolved over the years
whether the regulations are impeding innovation in the crypto space
how stablecoins should be regulated
what Coy thinks about the UST collapse
what is the SEC’s take on decentralization
whether ETH is centralized and whether it is a commodity
why the SEC has not approved a BTC spot ETF

Book Update

My book, The Cryptopians: Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze, which is all about Ethereum and the 2017 ICO mania, is now available!

You can purchase it here: http://bit.ly/cryptopians

LUNA Has a Tumultuous Launch